[Fic] Dreams and Realities, chapter two
TITLE: Dreams and Realities, chapter two (of four)
GENRE: Humour / Romance
RATING: PG15 / T
DISCLAIMER: xXxholic belongs the four wonderful Osakan women that go by the collective name of "CLAMP", and some other companies and organizations that claim ownership of their babies. Watanuki and Doumeki are not mine, never will be, and I promise to give them back when I'm done playing with them.
STATUS: Complete (to be posted in installments)
NOTES: The second chapter is up, people. Once again, many thanks to my wonderful betas Beboots and Product of a Sick Society for their invaluable help.
SUMMARY: Watanuki was used to dreaming about strange things. He was even used to dreaming about strange people. What he was not used to, was dreaming about him in that way... and pulling that dream into reality.
Dreams and Realities
Chapter two
It would have been a severe understatement to say that Watanuki was not feeling very happy with the world that morning. Nothing short of ‘livid’ could possibly even begin to describe the way he felt. Even that word, in his personal opinion, was not strong enough.
The black-haired boy fumed as he wrapped up three bento boxes. He didn’t deserve this. No, he didn’t. He was a good person, he really was. He tried his best at everything he did, nobody could deny that. He worked hard, he cooked well, he was always doing what Yuuko demanded of him without -cough- complaining, he always paid his debts in full, he even tried his best at school! Never mind the fact he didn’t even know which year he was in, he just knew he was a good student, damn it!
Then why oh why did he have to dream about him?
Why oh why couldn’t it have been sweet, beautiful Himawari-chan the one in his dream? Of all the people in the world, why did it have to be him?
Him.
Doumeki.
Watanuki slumped to the floor, grabbing his head in his hands and screaming his indignation to the heavens.
“WHY? WHY HIM?”
Obnoxious, insufferable, ungrateful, egotist, unfeeling, shameless, perverted, male Doumeki.
That was so wrong on so many different levels that Watanuki couldn’t even begin to enumerate them.
He felt dirty. Defiled. His innocence lost forever, never to come back. Never mind the fact that he had enjoyed it, and quite a lot at that. He had conveniently blocked that particular piece of information out of his mind.
He had tried to forget about it. He had really tried, done his best to think of other things, immerse himself in cooking the bento for lunch and breakfast for himself -although he had no memory of eating it- but to no avail.
The harder he tried to forget, the clearer he remembered.
It hadn’t helped, of course, that he had been forced to cook a bento for that big oaf, nor that today’s order was as difficult to make as ever, possibly even more. No, it definitely hadn’t.
If anything, it had reminded him of just how very unfair life was to him.
And to think that out there, somewhere, there were normal people who didn’t have any of his problems. People who weren’t forced to be in the company of that jerk, who didn’t owe him their very lives, who didn’t have that jerk invade their private dreams, who didn’t have to cook him bento every single frigging day. Just to think of the existence of those very, very lucky people made him want to kick something. Why oh why couldn’t he have been one of those people? Why oh why did he have to be plagued by that pest?
Oh, he could always ignore the big oaf, of course. The only problem would be that then he would be plagued by extremely annoying, not to mention incredibly dangerous ayakashi instead. Ayakashi who wanted him for their dinner, and not because they wanted him to cook it for them.
At times like this, however, he wondered whether putting up with the ayakashi would be less annoying than putting up with him.
Watanuki sniffled dramatically and got back on his feet.
He wasn’t going to be brought down by this. He was strong, he would recover.
He wasn’t going to let that jerk get the better of him.
After all, despite all his suffering, there were two little, tiny, minuscule rays of sunshine. A small consolation, perhaps, but enough to make him think that there was justice in this world, all things considered.
He grabbed hold of that small consolation as though it were the last thread that kept his sanity together, and gave him enough strength to go on walking along the winding path that was his strange life.
The first one, a simple yet strong truth, made him able to stop sniffling and concentrate on his remaining tasks for the morning. It was the simple, strong truth that, as strange and realistic as his dreams were, no one alive other than Yuuko -and Sakura and Syaoran- had been able to look into them, and not even she gave any indication when awake that she had. There was no reason for anyone to ever know what he had dreamt last night, and who he had dreamt about.
The boy with the mismatched eyes finished wrapping the bento, grabbed his schoolbag, put on his shoes and left the building with a new sense of purpose, given by the second glimpse of light that shone on his gloomy mood.
After all, even in all his misery he could grin and cackle evilly when he remembered that during the dream, it had been Doumeki who had played the role of the girl.
At lunch time, Doumeki plopped down next to Watanuki with a scowl on his face and an incriminatory tone in his voice.
“You never showed up at the temple this morning.”
Watanuki bristled like a cat at Doumeki, but refused to meet his eyes. Of course he hadn’t shown up at Doumeki's temple. He had purposely left earlier than usual and taken a different route to school than normal, so that he would have no chances of meeting the guy. In doing so he had risked meeting an ayakashi -or several- on his way, but mercifully there had been no strange sightings at all.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t avoid the pest during lunch time because that would mean changing his lunch-eating location on the school grounds under the big sakura tree -currently not in bloom- and that would mean sweet, beautiful Himawari-chan wouldn’t have been able to find him, either.
Watanuki very carefully avoided looking at the taller boy, concentrating instead in glaring at a non-descript shape in the distance. The nerve of the guy. As if he was going to let him walk him to school after intruding so rudely in his dreams the night before.
Never mind the fact that he only did it to keep him safe from ayakashi, it was just preposterous to think he would put up with his presence during the entire trip to school after what the jerk had done.
By this time, Watanuki’s logic had distorted somewhat from what could pass as normal for him.
His thinking processes went something like this:
1- Doumeki was a jerk.
2- Doumeki always made him uncomfortable with his actions, words or simply the way he looked.
3- Doumeki had appeared last night in a dream that had made him very uncomfortable.
4- The jerk must have done something to cause this, since he always caused him to be uncomfortable.
5- The jerk was the one at fault here.
That was how he had reached the conclusion that, in some way or another, it was Doumeki’s fault that he had had such a dream the night before, and he should be punished for it.
Watanuki refused to contemplate that if it really had been just a dream -and he was desperately hoping it had been- Doumeki would have no way to know what he had done wrong, because dreams, after all, were usually very private things.
Unless he chose to tell him something about it, Doumeki would be completely ignorant of his current woes and the reason he was avoiding him.
That of, course, assuming it had only been a dream, something the careful observer must have realized by now it hadn’t been, but neither of the boys knew that... yet.
Doumeki scowled at Watanuki for the better part of a minute.
He wasn’t bothering to make assumptions about the dream he had had the night before, even if his instincts were screaming at him that there was something more to it than it seemed at first.
He was paying no heed to the fact that he was still quite sore. He wasn’t even thinking about his hickey, now currently concealed under his shirt.
If Doumeki had been a mind reader, and could have taken a look at what Watanuki was thinking about at the moment, he would have been able to collect important information that would have confirmed his suspicions that last night’s dream had been a bit more than a simple dream. The reason for this was that even the most superficial survey of the strange boy’s current thoughts would have displayed shockingly clear images that weren’t really out of place in a teenage boy’s mind, but that he would have had no trouble recognizing even though Doumeki was not currently thinking about those very same images. Those kinds of images, after all, are stubborn and refuse to leave the mind of healthy teenage boys without a struggle.
It was a shame, really, that he wasn’t a mind-reader, after all. That ability would have given him, at least, a suitable explanation as for the cause to his current indignant accusation.
Doumeki felt quite justified in recriminating Watanuki for ditching him. He had, after all, gone to great lengths to keep the weird boy alive, and it would have been a terrible waste to have gone through all that just to have him eaten by something strange when he wasn’t nearby.
However, being his usual paranoid self, Watanuki only interpreted his accusations as an effort to, once more, make him feel uncomfortable, because the more Doumeki looked at him like that, the more Watanuki felt his mind invaded -accosted- by memories of the previous night’s dream.
Not that he wanted to remember. Of course not. He was just in shock, that’s all. It was like the victims of horrible accidents, who kept reliving their trauma, unable to free their minds of the memory of the horrible, horrible events they had been subjected to.
Because the memory of last night’s dream was nothing if not horrible. There was nothing good about the memory of skin, and lips, and heat. Not when said skin, lips and heat belonged to that jerk.
Not when that jerk had suddenly changed his mind about scowling at him and was currently tucking in to his home-made bento, without even a word of thanks.
Feeling safe in the knowledge that there was no way Doumeki could know what he had dreamt about last night and still intent in punishing the bastard for his rudeness, he proceeded to react in typical Watanuki fashion, which is to say, screaming and waving an accusing finger at the shameless, insensitive jerk for starting to eat right away without waiting for all of them to be there.
“You could at least thank me before you started eating! You ungrateful, shameless bastard!”
Doumeki glanced at Watanuki, feeling the other boy’s accusations to be unjustified. If he hadn’t been grateful for the food, he wouldn’t be eating it, now would he?
“Idiot.”
“What did you just call me?”
“I called you an idiot.”
“You don’t need to repeat yourself!”
“Then don’t ask me to.”
“I wasn’t asking you to repeat what you said!”
“You made a question. I would call that asking.”
“People are not always asking things when they make questions!”
Before he could argue his perfectly logical point further, Watanuki was interrupted by the most beautiful voice in the world accompanied by a vision of the cutest girl in the entire surface of the earth - no other opinions accepted - coming running towards them, long curly hair cascading down her back, lovely face apologetic.
“I’m sorry I took so long.”
Immediately following these words, Watanuki jumped to his feet, sporting the biggest smile he had displayed that day.
“Hi-ma-wa-ri-chaaaaan!”
Doumeki watched, slightly amused, as Watanuki performed his ‘Himawari-chan is so cute' dance, guiding her to the cloth spread out on the grass, dusting the spot where she would be sitting, placing her bento in front of her and offering her a glass of iced tea, all in the space of three seconds flat.
Then his eyes narrowed, his face adopting a scowl as he noticed something.
“Oi.”
“Haven’t I told you not to call me ‘Oi’?”
Doumeki allowed himself only one second to properly enjoy the sudden change in expression in Watanuki’s face -it never ceased to amuse him- before he pointed his chopsticks in the direction of the girl’s bento.
“How come my sausages aren’t octopus-shaped?”
As if to make his point, he grabbed one of his plain sausages and shoved it right in front of Watanuki’s eyes, making him squint slightly.
“There is no reason for them to be!”
Himawari said her thanks and started eating her own, cutely octopus-shaped sausages, watching Watanuki bristle like a cat at Doumeki, who was wearing his trademark scowl and still hadn’t removed his chopsticks from Watanuki’s face, as if expecting the other boy to grab his sausage and give it the desired shape then and there.
“I don’t see why not.”
“It’s obvious why! Octopus-shaped sausages are cute! Himawari-chan is cute, so her bento has to be cute! You are not cute, and so there is no reason why your food should be!”
Doumeki didn’t reply, but he didn’t change his expression. Neither did he remove his chopsticks.
Therefore, Watanuki felt the need to explain his foolproof logic further. Obviously Doumeki was so thick-headed that he wasn’t able to comprehend such a basic truth of the universe without his help.
“In fact, you are sooo far removed from the concept of cute that if ‘cute’ ever had to be used in relation to your person, it would surely lose all of its cuteness, shrivel up, and die!”
Doumeki only narrowed his eyes a fraction of a millimetre more before removing his chopsticks from in front of Watanuki’s face, propping the aforementioned plain sausage into his mouth and turning his gaze to his bento.
“Don’t forget to make them octopus-shaped tomorrow.”
“Why, youuuuu!” Watanuki was getting so angry that his face was turning slightly purple. Doumeki just stuck a finger from his free hand in the ear closest to Watanuki, while he kept popping food in his mouth with the other.
Himawari chose that particular moment to let out a soft giggle, Tampopo chirping happily from its perch in her shoulder.
“You two are so close today. Did something happen last night?”
There was a full second when no sound was heard, save for the faint whisper of the breeze on the leaves of the nearby tree, the chirping of Tampopo, and the slight popping sound made by the last thread that kept Watanuki’s sanity into place coming cleanly apart.
“W... W... WHY WOULD ANYTHING HAPPEN BETWEEN US LAST NIGHT?”
Doumeki let Watanuki suffer alone for a few seconds, watching how the shorter boy’s face adopted the wildest and widest selection of bewildered expressions he had yet seen and his mouth spluttered barely intelligible nonsense - “nothing at all” - “why would we” - “not with him!” - “you’ve got it all wrong!” - before taking pity of him and easing his suffering.
“She didn’t ask if something happened between us last night.”
When the other boy just stared at him blankly, the loudest silence ever heard filling the entire place, he clarified.
“There was no ´between us´ in her question. That was all your assumption.”
The amount of flailing and shouting that followed his perfectly sensible statement was so grandiose, that Doumeki had to plug both his ears with his fingers to be able to properly enjoy it.
Contrary to what Watanuki believed and often preached, Doumeki was no stranger to shame, just as he was no stranger to pain.
The difference was that while he was on a first-name basis with pain, he was only a passing acquaintance with shame. That is to say, he was able to recognize its existence, and sometimes even looked at it straight in the eye, but he had never really stopped for conversation.
Shame, it seemed, wasn’t very happy with this arrangement, if the events that took place during archery practice that afternoon were of any indication.
As he changed into his archery clothes, leaving his neck and part of his chest totally exposed -leaving his hickey totally exposed- he had wondered very briefly whether anyone would notice.
He had certainly not expected the level of staring and whispering he got as soon as he stepped into the dojo. Really, for all people knew, it could have been a birthmark. Or a bruise. A coin-shaped, rosy-coloured bruise. Right where the neck and the shoulder met.
How very naive he had been.
Shame, it seemed, was making a lot of effort to procure his friendship. He turned his back to it and went to grab his arrows.
It wasn’t difficult to ignore the stares of his classmates. It wasn’t even difficult to ignore the whispers. He had endured worse staring and worse whispering every time he had had to carry an unconscious Watanuki to his home, or to Yuuko’s shop, not to mention all those times he had been on the receiving end of Watanuki’s rants and flailing. Stares and whispers he could handle.
What he wasn’t sure he could handle was his archery instructor, a very sweet old lady who sometimes even went to his home for tea, gaping at him when he turned back to face the room at large.
She was staring right at his -he now realized- very obvious hickey. She slowly raised her eyes from his neck to his face.
Shame waved happily at him from behind her eyes.
He returned her stare without a change in expression, waiting for the inevitable question... that never came. She just turned, clapped her hands once and called everybody to line up.
Shame, dejected, slunk out of the dojo, leaving him free to concentrate on his bow, his arrows, the target, and nothing else.
Watanuki took as long as he dared to get to Yuuko’s shop. He had a very good reason for doing so.
It wasn’t that the work was hard, or Yuuko was unmanageable, or Mokona was annoying. Those were his normal reasons to take as long as he dared to get to her shop. That day, Watanuki had a special reason not to hurry.
Said special reason had very little to do with what he was expected to do as her hired help, and a lot to do with the images that kept flashing uninvited through his mind.
He wasn’t looking forward to facing his drunken, omniscient, happy-go-lucky employer with those images running wild in his mind. Not when she always knew. Not when she always tortured him about what she knew.
Watanuki stopped just in front of the gates, doing his best to empty his mind of all thought, steeling himself before he took even a single step inside.
Be strong, Watanuki Kimihiro. Keep cool. Don’t let her think anything strange happened to you.
Watanuki knew, just knew, that if Yuuko ever found out what and who he had dreamed about the previous night, he would never be able to live it down. She would make sure he didn’t forget about it for the rest of his days.
He clenched his jaw, puffed out his chest and stepped resolutely into the shop.
“Tadaimaaaaargh!”
He hadn’t even been able to take off his shoes before a furry comet had flown to meet him, almost strangling him in its loving ministrations.
“Mugetsu! Stop that!”
Not without considerable effort, Watanuki managed to catch the enthusiastic kudakitsune and pull it away from his face, which the little furry creature was smothering with kisses.
“What’s up with you today?”
“He is just happy to see you, that’s all.”
Watanuki froze. Moving a fraction of an inch at a time, he turned to face Yuuko, who was currently wearing one of her fanciest, scantiest, flashiest outfits, and a grin that would have put the Cheshire cat to shame.
She knows.
Yuuko slowly bent forward, looking at him straight in the eye.
“Today is a special day, after all.”
Watanuki tried his best not to be intimidated by her words, or her dirty grin, or her eyes, or the privileged view he had of a bouncing part of Yuuko’s anatomy he wasn’t sure he was allowed to stare at.
Instead, he plastered on his best fake smile and asked, in as innocent a tone of voice as he could, “And why is that, Yuuko-san?”
Watanuki felt the silence stretch between them like a separate entity; a living, breathing being that feasted on his nervousness like it was the most delicious thing in the world.
“Why, it’s the anniversary of the day we received Mugetsu as payment, of course. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten?”
A huge wave of relief crashed down on the beach of Watanuki’s mind, erasing all the words of panic that had been written on the sand with the stick of Yuuko’s grin.
Without waiting for his reply, Yuuko continued, the happiest, cutest, most child-like expression on her face.
“And that’s why we are having a party today! Watanuki, bring out the drinks!”
“You just wanted an excuse to drink, as always!”
Watanuki fumed.
Life definitely wasn’t fair to him.
It wasn’t enough that he had been forced to endure the humiliation of waking up to a dream of that nature that had involved that guy. It hadn’t been enough that that guy had pestered him with his presence all through lunch. It hadn’t been enough that he had almost blurted out what he had dreamt about when cute, sweet Himawari-chan had asked.
No. He had also been forced to cook enough snacks to feed an army and drag countless bottles out of Yuuko’s storage room so that the shameless woman and the black bun could cheerfully drink their way to liver disease. It never stopped amazing him how that little black bunny-like creature could eat and drink several times its own weight. He had the impression that Yuuko could do that, too. How did the woman manage to never gain weight?
Several hours after the “party” had began, she had finally managed to drink enough to pass out, and he had also had to drag the drunken lady to her bedroom so that she wouldn’t get a crick in her back from sleeping on a hard wooden floor.
As if he didn’t have enough things to do already, what with having to clean out all the empty bottles and do all the dishes of all the food she and Mokona had gobbled up.
Before leaving, he had placed a bottle of the strongest available hangover medicine next to her futon. He was too kind to the crazy woman, sometimes.
He stopped a second to sigh dramatically before beginning to put on his shoes to leave.
At least he wouldn’t have to cook dinner for himself now, since some of the ridiculously-expensive and nearly-impossible-to-get roasted fish had miraculously survived the culinary attack of the party beasts. Yuuko, in a display of unusual generosity, had told him to take it home with him, shortly before passing out.
He had also prepared a thermos flask of green tea before leaving.
He really wasn’t in the mood to do anything once he got to the safety of his apartment, save eat, curl up in his futon and sleep the rest of that horrible day into oblivion.
He finished putting on his shoes, grabbed the bag with the food and the flask of tea and left the shop.
“So, did something happen last night?”
Watanuki almost fell flat on his face when he heard that voice.
That annoying, grating, emotionless voice.
Such a voice could belong to one person, and one person only.
“You again!”
When he turned violently around, he found himself face-to-face with a very annoyed-looking Doumeki Shizuka... quite literally face-to-face.
“Don’t stand so close to people, you jerk!”
Watanuki ran a couple of steps backwards to put some distance between himself and that guy. After the previous night’s dream -which he had almost been able to forget about- he wasn’t feeling very comfortable standing so close to the bane of his existence.
Doumeki, arms folded across his chest, kept staring Watanuki right in the eye and repeated his question.
“Did something happen last night? You never answered Kunogi.”
Watanuki willed his breathing back to normal and turned so he wasn’t looking at Doumeki’s face. He wasn’t feeling comfortable looking at him, either.
He resumed walking back home from Yuuko’s shop, an activity that had been rudely interrupted just as he was crossing the gate. If the jerk had been there the entire time, why hadn’t he come in? It wasn’t like he couldn’t see the shop anymore.
“Why would you think anything happened last night?”
Doumeki started following Watanuki -dogging him, the shorter guy thought- and answered in his own brand of logic.
“Because you looked dumber than usual when she asked.”
Watanuki never got a chance to reply to such an outrageous statement.
As soon as he turned to face the still-too-close guy, ready to scream his indignation, a cloud of pure black smoke appeared out of nowhere and enveloped the two of them.
A mangy stray that had been watching the scene approached the spot where the two boys had been and sniffed it half-heartedly. There was nothing there.
So that’s it for chapter two.
Click here to go to chapter three
Still, if you liked the story so far, please let me know. It’s always good encouragement to know there is someone on the other side who wants to read what you are writing. :)
If you missed it, and are wondering what the heck I was talking about, here is chapter one.
Glossary and cultural notes:
Bento: Boxed lunch. In case you were wondering, Japanese people do shape their bento sausages (among other things) into cute shapes, octopus being one of the favourites. We can actually see Doumeki eating one somewhere in volume three of the manga, but I’m supposing he took that from Himawari’s bento, since I really can’t picture Watanuki putting in the effort to do something so cute for Doumeki, of all people.
Tadaima: “I’m home”: what Japanese people call aloud when they get home. Watanuki always calls it when he gets to Yuuko’s shop, although technically it wouldn’t be necessary as it’s not really his home, only his workplace. The proper answer to this is “okaeri nasai”, which means “welcome home”. Mugetsu was only answering in his own fashion, since he can’t speak. :3
Kudakitsune: Tube/pipe fox. The cute, furry and Watanuki-loving fox spirit they got as payment for completing Ame-Warashi’s (the child of the rain) request.
GENRE: Humour / Romance
RATING: PG15 / T
DISCLAIMER: xXxholic belongs the four wonderful Osakan women that go by the collective name of "CLAMP", and some other companies and organizations that claim ownership of their babies. Watanuki and Doumeki are not mine, never will be, and I promise to give them back when I'm done playing with them.
STATUS: Complete (to be posted in installments)
NOTES: The second chapter is up, people. Once again, many thanks to my wonderful betas Beboots and Product of a Sick Society for their invaluable help.
SUMMARY: Watanuki was used to dreaming about strange things. He was even used to dreaming about strange people. What he was not used to, was dreaming about him in that way... and pulling that dream into reality.
Dreams and Realities
Chapter two
It would have been a severe understatement to say that Watanuki was not feeling very happy with the world that morning. Nothing short of ‘livid’ could possibly even begin to describe the way he felt. Even that word, in his personal opinion, was not strong enough.
The black-haired boy fumed as he wrapped up three bento boxes. He didn’t deserve this. No, he didn’t. He was a good person, he really was. He tried his best at everything he did, nobody could deny that. He worked hard, he cooked well, he was always doing what Yuuko demanded of him without -cough- complaining, he always paid his debts in full, he even tried his best at school! Never mind the fact he didn’t even know which year he was in, he just knew he was a good student, damn it!
Then why oh why did he have to dream about him?
Why oh why couldn’t it have been sweet, beautiful Himawari-chan the one in his dream? Of all the people in the world, why did it have to be him?
Him.
Doumeki.
Watanuki slumped to the floor, grabbing his head in his hands and screaming his indignation to the heavens.
“WHY? WHY HIM?”
Obnoxious, insufferable, ungrateful, egotist, unfeeling, shameless, perverted, male Doumeki.
That was so wrong on so many different levels that Watanuki couldn’t even begin to enumerate them.
He felt dirty. Defiled. His innocence lost forever, never to come back. Never mind the fact that he had enjoyed it, and quite a lot at that. He had conveniently blocked that particular piece of information out of his mind.
He had tried to forget about it. He had really tried, done his best to think of other things, immerse himself in cooking the bento for lunch and breakfast for himself -although he had no memory of eating it- but to no avail.
The harder he tried to forget, the clearer he remembered.
It hadn’t helped, of course, that he had been forced to cook a bento for that big oaf, nor that today’s order was as difficult to make as ever, possibly even more. No, it definitely hadn’t.
If anything, it had reminded him of just how very unfair life was to him.
And to think that out there, somewhere, there were normal people who didn’t have any of his problems. People who weren’t forced to be in the company of that jerk, who didn’t owe him their very lives, who didn’t have that jerk invade their private dreams, who didn’t have to cook him bento every single frigging day. Just to think of the existence of those very, very lucky people made him want to kick something. Why oh why couldn’t he have been one of those people? Why oh why did he have to be plagued by that pest?
Oh, he could always ignore the big oaf, of course. The only problem would be that then he would be plagued by extremely annoying, not to mention incredibly dangerous ayakashi instead. Ayakashi who wanted him for their dinner, and not because they wanted him to cook it for them.
At times like this, however, he wondered whether putting up with the ayakashi would be less annoying than putting up with him.
Watanuki sniffled dramatically and got back on his feet.
He wasn’t going to be brought down by this. He was strong, he would recover.
He wasn’t going to let that jerk get the better of him.
After all, despite all his suffering, there were two little, tiny, minuscule rays of sunshine. A small consolation, perhaps, but enough to make him think that there was justice in this world, all things considered.
He grabbed hold of that small consolation as though it were the last thread that kept his sanity together, and gave him enough strength to go on walking along the winding path that was his strange life.
The first one, a simple yet strong truth, made him able to stop sniffling and concentrate on his remaining tasks for the morning. It was the simple, strong truth that, as strange and realistic as his dreams were, no one alive other than Yuuko -and Sakura and Syaoran- had been able to look into them, and not even she gave any indication when awake that she had. There was no reason for anyone to ever know what he had dreamt last night, and who he had dreamt about.
The boy with the mismatched eyes finished wrapping the bento, grabbed his schoolbag, put on his shoes and left the building with a new sense of purpose, given by the second glimpse of light that shone on his gloomy mood.
After all, even in all his misery he could grin and cackle evilly when he remembered that during the dream, it had been Doumeki who had played the role of the girl.
At lunch time, Doumeki plopped down next to Watanuki with a scowl on his face and an incriminatory tone in his voice.
“You never showed up at the temple this morning.”
Watanuki bristled like a cat at Doumeki, but refused to meet his eyes. Of course he hadn’t shown up at Doumeki's temple. He had purposely left earlier than usual and taken a different route to school than normal, so that he would have no chances of meeting the guy. In doing so he had risked meeting an ayakashi -or several- on his way, but mercifully there had been no strange sightings at all.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t avoid the pest during lunch time because that would mean changing his lunch-eating location on the school grounds under the big sakura tree -currently not in bloom- and that would mean sweet, beautiful Himawari-chan wouldn’t have been able to find him, either.
Watanuki very carefully avoided looking at the taller boy, concentrating instead in glaring at a non-descript shape in the distance. The nerve of the guy. As if he was going to let him walk him to school after intruding so rudely in his dreams the night before.
Never mind the fact that he only did it to keep him safe from ayakashi, it was just preposterous to think he would put up with his presence during the entire trip to school after what the jerk had done.
By this time, Watanuki’s logic had distorted somewhat from what could pass as normal for him.
His thinking processes went something like this:
1- Doumeki was a jerk.
2- Doumeki always made him uncomfortable with his actions, words or simply the way he looked.
3- Doumeki had appeared last night in a dream that had made him very uncomfortable.
4- The jerk must have done something to cause this, since he always caused him to be uncomfortable.
5- The jerk was the one at fault here.
That was how he had reached the conclusion that, in some way or another, it was Doumeki’s fault that he had had such a dream the night before, and he should be punished for it.
Watanuki refused to contemplate that if it really had been just a dream -and he was desperately hoping it had been- Doumeki would have no way to know what he had done wrong, because dreams, after all, were usually very private things.
Unless he chose to tell him something about it, Doumeki would be completely ignorant of his current woes and the reason he was avoiding him.
That of, course, assuming it had only been a dream, something the careful observer must have realized by now it hadn’t been, but neither of the boys knew that... yet.
Doumeki scowled at Watanuki for the better part of a minute.
He wasn’t bothering to make assumptions about the dream he had had the night before, even if his instincts were screaming at him that there was something more to it than it seemed at first.
He was paying no heed to the fact that he was still quite sore. He wasn’t even thinking about his hickey, now currently concealed under his shirt.
If Doumeki had been a mind reader, and could have taken a look at what Watanuki was thinking about at the moment, he would have been able to collect important information that would have confirmed his suspicions that last night’s dream had been a bit more than a simple dream. The reason for this was that even the most superficial survey of the strange boy’s current thoughts would have displayed shockingly clear images that weren’t really out of place in a teenage boy’s mind, but that he would have had no trouble recognizing even though Doumeki was not currently thinking about those very same images. Those kinds of images, after all, are stubborn and refuse to leave the mind of healthy teenage boys without a struggle.
It was a shame, really, that he wasn’t a mind-reader, after all. That ability would have given him, at least, a suitable explanation as for the cause to his current indignant accusation.
Doumeki felt quite justified in recriminating Watanuki for ditching him. He had, after all, gone to great lengths to keep the weird boy alive, and it would have been a terrible waste to have gone through all that just to have him eaten by something strange when he wasn’t nearby.
However, being his usual paranoid self, Watanuki only interpreted his accusations as an effort to, once more, make him feel uncomfortable, because the more Doumeki looked at him like that, the more Watanuki felt his mind invaded -accosted- by memories of the previous night’s dream.
Not that he wanted to remember. Of course not. He was just in shock, that’s all. It was like the victims of horrible accidents, who kept reliving their trauma, unable to free their minds of the memory of the horrible, horrible events they had been subjected to.
Because the memory of last night’s dream was nothing if not horrible. There was nothing good about the memory of skin, and lips, and heat. Not when said skin, lips and heat belonged to that jerk.
Not when that jerk had suddenly changed his mind about scowling at him and was currently tucking in to his home-made bento, without even a word of thanks.
Feeling safe in the knowledge that there was no way Doumeki could know what he had dreamt about last night and still intent in punishing the bastard for his rudeness, he proceeded to react in typical Watanuki fashion, which is to say, screaming and waving an accusing finger at the shameless, insensitive jerk for starting to eat right away without waiting for all of them to be there.
“You could at least thank me before you started eating! You ungrateful, shameless bastard!”
Doumeki glanced at Watanuki, feeling the other boy’s accusations to be unjustified. If he hadn’t been grateful for the food, he wouldn’t be eating it, now would he?
“Idiot.”
“What did you just call me?”
“I called you an idiot.”
“You don’t need to repeat yourself!”
“Then don’t ask me to.”
“I wasn’t asking you to repeat what you said!”
“You made a question. I would call that asking.”
“People are not always asking things when they make questions!”
Before he could argue his perfectly logical point further, Watanuki was interrupted by the most beautiful voice in the world accompanied by a vision of the cutest girl in the entire surface of the earth - no other opinions accepted - coming running towards them, long curly hair cascading down her back, lovely face apologetic.
“I’m sorry I took so long.”
Immediately following these words, Watanuki jumped to his feet, sporting the biggest smile he had displayed that day.
“Hi-ma-wa-ri-chaaaaan!”
Doumeki watched, slightly amused, as Watanuki performed his ‘Himawari-chan is so cute' dance, guiding her to the cloth spread out on the grass, dusting the spot where she would be sitting, placing her bento in front of her and offering her a glass of iced tea, all in the space of three seconds flat.
Then his eyes narrowed, his face adopting a scowl as he noticed something.
“Oi.”
“Haven’t I told you not to call me ‘Oi’?”
Doumeki allowed himself only one second to properly enjoy the sudden change in expression in Watanuki’s face -it never ceased to amuse him- before he pointed his chopsticks in the direction of the girl’s bento.
“How come my sausages aren’t octopus-shaped?”
As if to make his point, he grabbed one of his plain sausages and shoved it right in front of Watanuki’s eyes, making him squint slightly.
“There is no reason for them to be!”
Himawari said her thanks and started eating her own, cutely octopus-shaped sausages, watching Watanuki bristle like a cat at Doumeki, who was wearing his trademark scowl and still hadn’t removed his chopsticks from Watanuki’s face, as if expecting the other boy to grab his sausage and give it the desired shape then and there.
“I don’t see why not.”
“It’s obvious why! Octopus-shaped sausages are cute! Himawari-chan is cute, so her bento has to be cute! You are not cute, and so there is no reason why your food should be!”
Doumeki didn’t reply, but he didn’t change his expression. Neither did he remove his chopsticks.
Therefore, Watanuki felt the need to explain his foolproof logic further. Obviously Doumeki was so thick-headed that he wasn’t able to comprehend such a basic truth of the universe without his help.
“In fact, you are sooo far removed from the concept of cute that if ‘cute’ ever had to be used in relation to your person, it would surely lose all of its cuteness, shrivel up, and die!”
Doumeki only narrowed his eyes a fraction of a millimetre more before removing his chopsticks from in front of Watanuki’s face, propping the aforementioned plain sausage into his mouth and turning his gaze to his bento.
“Don’t forget to make them octopus-shaped tomorrow.”
“Why, youuuuu!” Watanuki was getting so angry that his face was turning slightly purple. Doumeki just stuck a finger from his free hand in the ear closest to Watanuki, while he kept popping food in his mouth with the other.
Himawari chose that particular moment to let out a soft giggle, Tampopo chirping happily from its perch in her shoulder.
“You two are so close today. Did something happen last night?”
There was a full second when no sound was heard, save for the faint whisper of the breeze on the leaves of the nearby tree, the chirping of Tampopo, and the slight popping sound made by the last thread that kept Watanuki’s sanity into place coming cleanly apart.
“W... W... WHY WOULD ANYTHING HAPPEN BETWEEN US LAST NIGHT?”
Doumeki let Watanuki suffer alone for a few seconds, watching how the shorter boy’s face adopted the wildest and widest selection of bewildered expressions he had yet seen and his mouth spluttered barely intelligible nonsense - “nothing at all” - “why would we” - “not with him!” - “you’ve got it all wrong!” - before taking pity of him and easing his suffering.
“She didn’t ask if something happened between us last night.”
When the other boy just stared at him blankly, the loudest silence ever heard filling the entire place, he clarified.
“There was no ´between us´ in her question. That was all your assumption.”
The amount of flailing and shouting that followed his perfectly sensible statement was so grandiose, that Doumeki had to plug both his ears with his fingers to be able to properly enjoy it.
Contrary to what Watanuki believed and often preached, Doumeki was no stranger to shame, just as he was no stranger to pain.
The difference was that while he was on a first-name basis with pain, he was only a passing acquaintance with shame. That is to say, he was able to recognize its existence, and sometimes even looked at it straight in the eye, but he had never really stopped for conversation.
Shame, it seemed, wasn’t very happy with this arrangement, if the events that took place during archery practice that afternoon were of any indication.
As he changed into his archery clothes, leaving his neck and part of his chest totally exposed -leaving his hickey totally exposed- he had wondered very briefly whether anyone would notice.
He had certainly not expected the level of staring and whispering he got as soon as he stepped into the dojo. Really, for all people knew, it could have been a birthmark. Or a bruise. A coin-shaped, rosy-coloured bruise. Right where the neck and the shoulder met.
How very naive he had been.
Shame, it seemed, was making a lot of effort to procure his friendship. He turned his back to it and went to grab his arrows.
It wasn’t difficult to ignore the stares of his classmates. It wasn’t even difficult to ignore the whispers. He had endured worse staring and worse whispering every time he had had to carry an unconscious Watanuki to his home, or to Yuuko’s shop, not to mention all those times he had been on the receiving end of Watanuki’s rants and flailing. Stares and whispers he could handle.
What he wasn’t sure he could handle was his archery instructor, a very sweet old lady who sometimes even went to his home for tea, gaping at him when he turned back to face the room at large.
She was staring right at his -he now realized- very obvious hickey. She slowly raised her eyes from his neck to his face.
Shame waved happily at him from behind her eyes.
He returned her stare without a change in expression, waiting for the inevitable question... that never came. She just turned, clapped her hands once and called everybody to line up.
Shame, dejected, slunk out of the dojo, leaving him free to concentrate on his bow, his arrows, the target, and nothing else.
Watanuki took as long as he dared to get to Yuuko’s shop. He had a very good reason for doing so.
It wasn’t that the work was hard, or Yuuko was unmanageable, or Mokona was annoying. Those were his normal reasons to take as long as he dared to get to her shop. That day, Watanuki had a special reason not to hurry.
Said special reason had very little to do with what he was expected to do as her hired help, and a lot to do with the images that kept flashing uninvited through his mind.
He wasn’t looking forward to facing his drunken, omniscient, happy-go-lucky employer with those images running wild in his mind. Not when she always knew. Not when she always tortured him about what she knew.
Watanuki stopped just in front of the gates, doing his best to empty his mind of all thought, steeling himself before he took even a single step inside.
Be strong, Watanuki Kimihiro. Keep cool. Don’t let her think anything strange happened to you.
Watanuki knew, just knew, that if Yuuko ever found out what and who he had dreamed about the previous night, he would never be able to live it down. She would make sure he didn’t forget about it for the rest of his days.
He clenched his jaw, puffed out his chest and stepped resolutely into the shop.
“Tadaimaaaaargh!”
He hadn’t even been able to take off his shoes before a furry comet had flown to meet him, almost strangling him in its loving ministrations.
“Mugetsu! Stop that!”
Not without considerable effort, Watanuki managed to catch the enthusiastic kudakitsune and pull it away from his face, which the little furry creature was smothering with kisses.
“What’s up with you today?”
“He is just happy to see you, that’s all.”
Watanuki froze. Moving a fraction of an inch at a time, he turned to face Yuuko, who was currently wearing one of her fanciest, scantiest, flashiest outfits, and a grin that would have put the Cheshire cat to shame.
She knows.
Yuuko slowly bent forward, looking at him straight in the eye.
“Today is a special day, after all.”
Watanuki tried his best not to be intimidated by her words, or her dirty grin, or her eyes, or the privileged view he had of a bouncing part of Yuuko’s anatomy he wasn’t sure he was allowed to stare at.
Instead, he plastered on his best fake smile and asked, in as innocent a tone of voice as he could, “And why is that, Yuuko-san?”
Watanuki felt the silence stretch between them like a separate entity; a living, breathing being that feasted on his nervousness like it was the most delicious thing in the world.
“Why, it’s the anniversary of the day we received Mugetsu as payment, of course. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten?”
A huge wave of relief crashed down on the beach of Watanuki’s mind, erasing all the words of panic that had been written on the sand with the stick of Yuuko’s grin.
Without waiting for his reply, Yuuko continued, the happiest, cutest, most child-like expression on her face.
“And that’s why we are having a party today! Watanuki, bring out the drinks!”
“You just wanted an excuse to drink, as always!”
Watanuki fumed.
Life definitely wasn’t fair to him.
It wasn’t enough that he had been forced to endure the humiliation of waking up to a dream of that nature that had involved that guy. It hadn’t been enough that that guy had pestered him with his presence all through lunch. It hadn’t been enough that he had almost blurted out what he had dreamt about when cute, sweet Himawari-chan had asked.
No. He had also been forced to cook enough snacks to feed an army and drag countless bottles out of Yuuko’s storage room so that the shameless woman and the black bun could cheerfully drink their way to liver disease. It never stopped amazing him how that little black bunny-like creature could eat and drink several times its own weight. He had the impression that Yuuko could do that, too. How did the woman manage to never gain weight?
Several hours after the “party” had began, she had finally managed to drink enough to pass out, and he had also had to drag the drunken lady to her bedroom so that she wouldn’t get a crick in her back from sleeping on a hard wooden floor.
As if he didn’t have enough things to do already, what with having to clean out all the empty bottles and do all the dishes of all the food she and Mokona had gobbled up.
Before leaving, he had placed a bottle of the strongest available hangover medicine next to her futon. He was too kind to the crazy woman, sometimes.
He stopped a second to sigh dramatically before beginning to put on his shoes to leave.
At least he wouldn’t have to cook dinner for himself now, since some of the ridiculously-expensive and nearly-impossible-to-get roasted fish had miraculously survived the culinary attack of the party beasts. Yuuko, in a display of unusual generosity, had told him to take it home with him, shortly before passing out.
He had also prepared a thermos flask of green tea before leaving.
He really wasn’t in the mood to do anything once he got to the safety of his apartment, save eat, curl up in his futon and sleep the rest of that horrible day into oblivion.
He finished putting on his shoes, grabbed the bag with the food and the flask of tea and left the shop.
“So, did something happen last night?”
Watanuki almost fell flat on his face when he heard that voice.
That annoying, grating, emotionless voice.
Such a voice could belong to one person, and one person only.
“You again!”
When he turned violently around, he found himself face-to-face with a very annoyed-looking Doumeki Shizuka... quite literally face-to-face.
“Don’t stand so close to people, you jerk!”
Watanuki ran a couple of steps backwards to put some distance between himself and that guy. After the previous night’s dream -which he had almost been able to forget about- he wasn’t feeling very comfortable standing so close to the bane of his existence.
Doumeki, arms folded across his chest, kept staring Watanuki right in the eye and repeated his question.
“Did something happen last night? You never answered Kunogi.”
Watanuki willed his breathing back to normal and turned so he wasn’t looking at Doumeki’s face. He wasn’t feeling comfortable looking at him, either.
He resumed walking back home from Yuuko’s shop, an activity that had been rudely interrupted just as he was crossing the gate. If the jerk had been there the entire time, why hadn’t he come in? It wasn’t like he couldn’t see the shop anymore.
“Why would you think anything happened last night?”
Doumeki started following Watanuki -dogging him, the shorter guy thought- and answered in his own brand of logic.
“Because you looked dumber than usual when she asked.”
Watanuki never got a chance to reply to such an outrageous statement.
As soon as he turned to face the still-too-close guy, ready to scream his indignation, a cloud of pure black smoke appeared out of nowhere and enveloped the two of them.
A mangy stray that had been watching the scene approached the spot where the two boys had been and sniffed it half-heartedly. There was nothing there.
So that’s it for chapter two.
Click here to go to chapter three
Still, if you liked the story so far, please let me know. It’s always good encouragement to know there is someone on the other side who wants to read what you are writing. :)
If you missed it, and are wondering what the heck I was talking about, here is chapter one.
Glossary and cultural notes:
Bento: Boxed lunch. In case you were wondering, Japanese people do shape their bento sausages (among other things) into cute shapes, octopus being one of the favourites. We can actually see Doumeki eating one somewhere in volume three of the manga, but I’m supposing he took that from Himawari’s bento, since I really can’t picture Watanuki putting in the effort to do something so cute for Doumeki, of all people.
Tadaima: “I’m home”: what Japanese people call aloud when they get home. Watanuki always calls it when he gets to Yuuko’s shop, although technically it wouldn’t be necessary as it’s not really his home, only his workplace. The proper answer to this is “okaeri nasai”, which means “welcome home”. Mugetsu was only answering in his own fashion, since he can’t speak. :3
Kudakitsune: Tube/pipe fox. The cute, furry and Watanuki-loving fox spirit they got as payment for completing Ame-Warashi’s (the child of the rain) request.